Violence and nihilism are spreading throughout the world. The more highly organized society is, the more possibility there is of violence; and the sense of non-cooperation, which is nihilism, must be on the increase. Law cannot solve this problem for we all depend on each other. If one highly specialized group strikes against another and the strike is legal, there is no way out of this disorder. The tyrannical States have forbidden strikes, but that is not the way either. Each specialized segment of the community is opposing another specialized group; and the poor, seeing affluence, naturally want part of it.
So there is tremendous struggle going on within society, leading to violence in every form. Law and police order cannot bring peace to the world, and we must have peace to survive at all. Peace is not established by the politicians; theirs is only a peace between two conflicts. Peace is A in the relationship of human beings whether they are black, white or pink, communist or A Catholic, and so on. The relationship is not at the intellectual level. A relationship at that level is no relationship at all. Relationship is on the human level of understanding and affection. This is denied when action conforms or adjusts to an image made by the intellect. Ideas are far more important to us than the human relationship of affection with its consideration.
Why have formulas become so important? Is it because we do not know how to act, and so escape into ideas, into formulas with which we hope to solve the problems? To kill an animal or a human being is the ultimate act of violence. We all recognize this deep down in our hearts, but yet find reasons, logical and illogical, why we should kill. So killing becomes the traditional way of dealing with problems that arise from living. Killing is not with the bayonet or with the bomb only, but also with the attitudes, the opinions, the judgements and the gestures that one uses to destroy others. We are taught to hate from childhood: a parent tells his children, 'Don't see so-and-so, he's not a nice man', or 'She's not one of us', and so the seed of hate is sown. The misery of it all is the importance given to prejudice, to established values and to dangerous things like nationalism and separate gods to which one has become accustomed. The collecting of garbage and the representation of God are specialized functions that people create as monopolies, and so these very people become the source of violence.
Most of us know all these things, some of us intellectually and others with emotional concern, but humanity seems to be unable to start anew, to look at all these problems with fresh eyes. Those who revolt against the past fall into another trap. This has been the historical process: the new gods become the old gods overnight.
Observing all this unemotionally, and certainly not intellectually, we see that action that is not born of ideas but out of quite a different state of mind becomes an urgent necessity. After all, love is not the monopoly of any State or any religion; it cannot be domesticated or tamed and put into the framework of a family. It is fierce and passionate, without the dead ashes of yesterday. Action born of this is relationship and this is the only way out.
